Ahead of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Monday meeting in Washington, DC, with United States President Donald
Trump, senior Canadian Cabinet ministers have been flying south this week for
visits with their American counterparts.

Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan sat down with U.S.
Secretary of Defence James Mattis at the Pentagon on Monday, Canadian Finance
Minister Bill Morneau is expected to participate in talks with White House
economic advisors on Thursday and on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Chrystia
Freeland met for the first time with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former
ExxonMobil CEO who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Feb. 1.

As part of a Cabinet reshuffle — and the Trudeau
government’s wider response to the election of Trump — Freeland, who served as
Trudeau’s trade minister, replaced Stéphane
Dion as foreign minister in January. She is known for her international
experience as a long-time journalist and author and for her contacts south of
the border, and is expected to be a fierce advocate for Canadian interests —
important qualifications for Trudeau’s representative abroad, given the
uncertainty surrounding Trump’s desire to renegotiate the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

That advocacy was firing on all cylinders this week as Freeland visited with Tillerson
and other members of the U.S. government, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and
Arizona Senator John McCain.

“In making the case for how balanced and mutually beneficial
our economic relationship was, I really felt I was pushing on an open door with
everyone I spoke to,” Freeland told reporters in a conference call with
Canadian media on Wednesday.

“It was important to make this trip now, important to have a
very early, initial meeting with Secretary Tillerson and to discuss a number of
issues, including but not limited to the Canada-U.S. relationship,” she said.

Freeland and Tillerson discussed NATO, Russia, Ukraine,
ISIS, Iraq and Syria, but the bulk of their conversation focused on economic
relations between Canada and the U.S.

Freeland stressed in the media call that formal talks on the
renegotiation of NAFTA have not yet begun, and declined to speculate on what
the Trump administration’s opening positions in such a negotiation might be.

“Neither [Commerce secretary nominee] Wilbur Ross nor [U.S.
trade representative nominee Robert Lighthizer] have been confirmed, so our
direct interlocutors on that file are not yet available for us to talk to,” she
said. “What I was able to do, and what I very much did with Secretary
Tillerson, was to establish a dialogue about the Canada-U.S. economic
relationship, to really underscore the extent to which it is a mutually
balanced, mutually beneficial relationship.”

Highlighting the two-way benefits of the bilateral
relationship has been at the forefront of the Trudeau government’s push to best
shield Canada from protectionist sentiments brewing in the U.S., especially at
a time when little is known about how Canada would be affected by the
re-visiting of NAFTA.

With the orders included in his mandate letter
to Freeland, Trudeau demonstrated the extent to which
U.S. affairs are a top priority for the government, going so far as to make Freeland the de-facto minister for trade with the U.S. The letter directs her to “lead
efforts to deepen trade and commerce between our two countries” and to “strengthen
trilateral North American cooperation with the United States and Mexico…to
enhance North America’s global competitiveness and facilitate trade and
commerce within the continent, including with respect to the North American
Free Trade Agreement.”

Freeland showed Wednesday she was not afraid to speak
plainly about her intention to “forcefully” protect Canada’s interests. Asked
about the possibility of a border
tax, proposed by Republican members of the House of Representatives tax
committee, she said: “I did make clear that we would be strongly opposed to any
imposition of new tariffs between Canada and the United States, that we felt
tariffs on exports would be mutually harmful to both Canada and the United
States, and that if such an idea were ever to come into being, Canada would
respond appropriately.”

This kind of talk squares with current prevailing sentiments
among Canadians. A new
Nanos poll found that 58 percent of Canadians asked would support a trade
war with the U.S., if the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on Canadian
exports.

Freeland did make sure to emphasize that the conversation in
Congress surrounding a potential tax reform plan, including the border element,
is “all very, very preliminary,” and that “many contrasting points of view” exist
in Congress around the plan.

Overall, despite the uncertainty hanging over trade
relations, Freeland was positive about this week’s visit, underlining that
Tillerson “is someone who knows Canada very well…and I think he will be a good
partner for us.”

While others — notably Canadian ambassador to the U.S. David
MacNaughton — have made
the case that senior Trump officials need to be made more aware of the
interrelatedness of the Canada-U.S. relationship, Freeland said she had a “very
strong sense from everyone I spoke with of the appreciation of the strong
relationship [between] Canada and the United States, very much including the
economic relationship.”

In addition to bilateral relations, Freeland told reporters
that she had a “substantive discussion” with Tillerson on both Russia and
Ukraine. “I expressed, as I always do, Canada’s very strong support for Ukraine,
and our strong view that the invasion and annexation of Crimea is illegal, and
a threat to the international order,” she said.

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